German couple in 1820 https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1avmpfo/ah_the_cla...

1943 German soldier https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1awtzf0/average_ge...

Pretty funny, but what do you expect.

It's amusing that the diversity-promoting prompt includes native Americans but excludes all other indigenous peoples.

It was extra hilarious when asked to generate a picture of ancient Greek philosopher it made it a Native American. Because it is well known Greeks not only had contact with the new world but also had prominent population of Native Americans.

It really wants to mash the whole world to a very specific US centric view of the world, and calls you bad for trying to avoid it.

Reminds me of when black people in the UK get called African American by Americans. No they're neither African nor American

It's an incredibly self-centered view of the world

I promise it's not because we think of people outside the US as American. When I was a kid in the 2000s, we were told never to say "black" and to say "African-American" instead. There was no PC term in the US to refer to black people who are not American. This has started to change lately, but it's still iffy.

Besides that, many Americans (including myself) are self-centered in other ways. Yes I like our imperial units better than the metric system, no I don't care that they're called "customary units" outside the US, etc.

Fahrenheit gets a bad rap.

100F is about as hot as you'll ever get. 0F is about as cold as you'll ever get. It's a perceptual system.

The day after I left Oslo after Christmas, it hit -20F. 0F is peanuts. I've also experienced above 100F several times. In the US, incidentally. It may be a perceptual system, but it's not very perceptive, and very culturally and geographically limited.

(incidentally I also have far more use for freezing point and boiling point of water, but I don't think it makes a big difference for celsius that those happen to be 0 and 100 either)

I grew up in a place where it'd get above 100F and below 0F pretty much every year.

But I will say, F is pretty decent still, even if the GP statement is a bit off:

100F is getting uncomfortably hot for a human. You gotta worry about heat stroke and stuff.

0F is getting uncomfortably cold for a human. You gotta worry about frostbite and dying from the cold if underdressed.

In the middle, you'll probably live. Get locked out of the house taking out the trash when it's 15F? You're probably okay until you find a neighbor. Get locked out of the house taking out the trash when it's -15F? You have a moment of mental sheer panic where you realize you might be getting frostbite and require medical attention if you don't get inside in like <10 minutes.

But yea I still use C for almost everything.

80F is uncomfortably hot for me unless I strip off; that's when my aircon goes on. And 55F is uncomfortably cold...

I think basically all of these are rationalisation (and that goes for the celsius numbers too). They don't matter. You learn very early which numbers you actually care about, and they're pretty much never going to be 0 or 100 on either scale.

You're not going to be thinking about whether it's 0 outside or not if locked out; just whether or not you're freezing cold or not.

It's not the bookends themselves that's the issue, it's the coarseness. Celsius is too coarse because it's extrapolated from 0-freezing and 100-boiling points. People can generally feel the difference between 1˚F increments, and roughly two make up 1˚C diff. Also, you can't really say "in the 70s" etc with Celsius. I watch a foreign weather report and that entire country is in the 20s ˚C for an entire week.

It's a minor difference either way, but I'm not going to switch to something slightly worse.

People don't generally need to communicate the difference between 20C and 20.6C (68F and 69F) unless measuring it directly, in which case you would use the exact decimal number.

I also don't think most people can tell the difference between 68F and 69F unless they are experiencing them very close between, and the perceived heat at that precision is dependent on a lot more than just the measured heat.

I don't get why saying "in the 70s" is better than saying "around 24" besides being used to one way or the other.

Fahrenheit is not better and for any scientific/engineering/proper measurement you would use celsius or kelvin (which shares a scale with celsius but with a different zero-point) anyway, so why keep fahrenheit? Unless for purely traditional or cultural reasons.

We tend to be much better at noticing temperature changes than fixed temperatures anyway, and more likely to reach to feeling that we're getting warmer or colder, than the specific temperature differential causing it. I think a lot of the people who think they feel differences at that precision really are feeling the difference of their heating/cooling turning on or off at different intervals. As I noted in another comment, having spent time trying to figure out how to make all of my living room - which isn't that big - comfortable at the same time, the difference is often huge, even with thermostats with 0.1 steps, because when the thermostats triggers, it's not like it will precisely lift the temperature at its measured zone by 0.1 steps. It will either heat my underfloor heating or my radiators to a point where they will first hit a 0.1 increase, plus the margin before it triggers the other direction again, at which point they'll get turned off, and significantly overshoot while the floor or radiator cools down. Setting a thermostat to 24.3 is not going to leave you with a room at 24.3, it's going to leave you with a room fluctuating between something like 22 and 26 in different places and heights and time intervals...

The only time I'll buy that anyone manages that level of precision is if they live in a very modern house with near perfect insulation where the heating or cooling input needed to keep it in balance is near nothing.

It's more achievable in a small single-story apartment, or better yet, a car. I can really feel the difference without looking at the number. There's also what you said about the trigger points, but it's still a good reason to have precision on a thermostat. I felt like it was slightly too cold yesterday, so I moved the thermostat up 1˚F and it felt warm enough.

And I'm not a scientist, but in science classes we were only using Kelvin, not Celsius. C and F aren't useful for proportions because 0 isn't 0. Even Rankine would be fine, just use different constants.

In my 48 years of using Celsius I can safely say I have never cared about smaller increments of celsius than 1. You're not keeping a room stable with that precision, for example, nor will the temperature at any given specific location outside be within that precision of your weather reports. Or anywhere close. And we can, and do, say "low 20's" "high 20s', "low 30's" etc. which serves the same effect. It's again, never in my 48 years mattered.

Either system is only "worse" when you're not used to it. It makes no practical difference other than when people try to argue for or against either system online.

The only real reason to consider switching would be that it's a pointless difference that creates minor friction in trade, but there too it's hardly a big deal given how small the effect is and how long it'd likely take to "pay for itself" in any kind of way, if ever.

You might not tell the difference, but evidently enough people can that digital thermostats commonly add 0.5 increments when switching into ˚C mode. And when they don't, some people put them into ˚F mode just for the extra precision.

I'm sure some do. And that more think they do. I still don't buy that the difference affects their lives in any meaningful way. My thermostat, btw. has 0.1 increments.

It does not matter, because when the heating is on the difference between the temperature measured at ground, at ceiling, at the edges or at the centre of the room will easily be a couple of degrees or more apart depending on just how significant the temperature differential is with the outside. Have measured, as part of figuring out how the hell to get to within even 3-4 degrees of the same temperature at different places in the same open living areas.

Very few people live in houses that are insulated well enough and with good enough temperature control that they have anything close to that level of precision control over the temperature in their house.

But if it makes them feel better to think they do, then, hey, they can get my kind of thermostats. At last count there are now 5 thermostats on different heating options in my living room, all with 0.1C steps.

this is why I use kelvin for everything.

Rankine enters the chat …

For those unaware, degrees Rankine are the same size as degrees Fahrenheit, but counting from absolute zero. It’s the English analogue to the French system’s Kelvin.

ehhh, it's just a scaling factor and no bias/offset, so I'm fine with that. Let's see.

273K = 0°C = 32°F = 491°R

298K = 25°C = 77°F = 536°R

373K = 100°C = 212°F = 671°R

No. That's just crazy.

Rankine and Fahrenheit, all you need for science and everyday.

I go outside the country and all the thermostats are in 0.5˚C increments because it's too coarse, heh.

I can't recall caring about <1 degree increments other than for fevers or when people discuss record highs or lows.

Lmao my thermostat in Germany was in Fahrenheit because the previous occupant disliked the inaccuracy of Celsius since the """software""" allowed the room to get colder before kicking in while in C.

Fahrenheit tells you how warm a human feels.

Celcius tells you how warm water feels.

Kelvin tells you how warm the atoms feel.

Also adding that "Caucasian" was somehow the politically-correct version of "white" here, then it reversed.

My black African ex once chewed out an American who not only called her African American but "corrected her" after she referred to herself as black, in a very clear British received pronunciation accent that has no hint of American to it, by insisting it was "African American".

And not while in the US either - but in the UK.

This reminds me of a YouTube video from a black female from the US, where she argued that Montenegro sounds too racist. Yet, that name existed way before the US was conceived.

Wow. I've been corrected on my English (as an Englishman, living in England, speaking English) by an American before. But to be corrected of your race is something else

Did they complain you didn't speak with the correct English accent too?

I always find it hilarious when Americans talk about English accents and seem to think there are one - or maybe two if they've seen any period movies or Mary Poppins -, given there are several clearly distinct English accents in use in my London borough alone (ignoring accents with immigrant origin, which would add many more)

it's either posh or cockney, right?

They wanted to find Leicester Square in London

- Hey can you tell me where "lie-sester" square is?

- Oh you mean "lester" square, yeah walk up that...

- No I'm pretty sure it's "lie-sester"

- Ok well I've never heard of that square, good luck!

I support them in their fight against how you guys pronounce certain things compared to how it is spelled. I'm not from the US though but Worcestershire sauce....come on.

That's fine, but that means I reserve the right to go to Detroit and insist it's pronounced "de-twa" and tell the locals they say it wrong because it has a french origin :)

Do b/Black people in the UK care about capitalization?

I'm not black, so I can't speak for black people in the UK.

But in terms of English language rather than their preference, I think you use a compound term, such as Black British, it's probably more correct to capitalize, at least if you intend it to be a compound rather than intend black as "just" an adjective that happens to be used to qualify British rather than referring to a specific group. "Black" by itself would not generally be capitalized unless at the start of a sentence any more than "white" would. And this seems to be generally reflected in how I see the term used in the UK.

Thank you for the thorough explanation.

I think it’s just that’s the word you’ve been taught to use. It’s divorced from the meaning of its constituent parts, you aren’t saying “an American of African descent” you’re saying “black” but in what was supposed to be some kind of politically correct way.

I cannot imagine even the most daft American using it in the UK and intending that the person is actually American.

Well it's pretty daft to call anyone American if they're not American

It's pretty daft to call anyone African if they're not African.

Yep, equally daft!

Yeah it's something that happens a lot. Yesterday I've seen a video calling a white animal "caucasian".

Was it an animal from the Caucasus mountains, though? Like the large bear-fighting dogs.

Huh, TIL about Caucasian Shepherd Dog. They used to use them for bear hunting!

Apparently also used by Russian prison guards today. Somehow it seems very fitting that they have bear-like dogs.

Yeah and so the phrase "African American" is a typical example of the ignorance of Americans thinking they're the only ones in the world.

Well, they're as "African" as "African Americans" are... OTOH, Elon Musk is a literal African American (as would be an Arab immigrant to the US from Egypt or Morocco), but can't be called that. So let's admit that such group labels are pretty messed up in general.

>as would be an Arab immigrant to the US from Egypt

If you want to get *very* technical then it's possible to not be African if you're from Egypt: "Egypt is a transcontinental country spanning the northeast corner of Africa and the Sinai Peninsula in the southwest corner of Asia."

Continents aren't technical, though. There are different definitions. Like, look into whether Georgia is considered part of Europe or Asia.

What is the preferred term in the UK - African British?

Well if they're black and you were describing their race you'd just say they're black.

If they're black and British and you're describing their nationality you'd say they were British.

If you started calling British black people "African", it wouldn't be long before you got a punch.

Its amazing how casual racism is.

Where is the racism? I only see a question about proper categorization.

There's an implicit assumption in it, that while I think it might well not have been trying to be offensive can be seen to suggests a black person in the UK would be African.

Not only do many of them not see themselves as such because they're born here, and their parents and grandparents might be British and/or born here (my son is mixed, his grandfather on his mothers side was Nigerian and British and born here; he is third generation British by some measure - his mother was born in Nigeria, but holds British citizenship due to her father; if he decides to consider himself African or Nigerian - he has a Nigerian citizenship - that's up to him, but he's born here, to a mother with a British citizenship, and has never set foot in any part of Africa), but another significant proportion of black people here consider themselves Caribbean rather than African, because their ancestry goes back many generations in the Caribbean, and that's where they or their recent ancestors immigrated from.

Here, "forcing" a categorization of "African" on someone will be seen by at least some people as implying they're immigrants, and even when that is actually the case, having the label forced on you is often a prelude to racist sentiments.

That all makes sense, but in this case I didn't read any ill intent. All I read was an American asking a categorization question. The immigration status was not relevant to 'African British'. It was simply a byproduct of 1990s/2000s culture where, in the US, "black" was not a term you could use without inferring racism. Rather folks were taught to use "African American" to mitigate racisim claims.

The other comment from hot_gil sums it up well,

"""

I promise it's not because we think of people outside the US as American. When I was a kid in the 2000s, we were told never to say "black" and to say "African-American" instead. There was no PC term in the US to refer to black people who are not American. This has started to change lately, but it's still iffy.

"""

There has been very vocal pressure to understand "lived experiences". This, to me, qualifies exactly as that and is purely a misinterpretation of the author's intent.

I figured that might be the case, and why I tried to thread softly with the first line of my reply. In Europe in general, the "where are you really from?" line of questioning is one most non-white (and quite a lot of white) people will run into, and while it is often used to obscure racism, anti-immigrant sentiment a bigger part of the discussion because it is often the "first layer" of a package that will turn out to include racism once you've peeled back the anti-immigration (not always - there are people who have anti-immigrant views who are not racist - the link, I think, rather goes the other direction: most of the racists are also anti-immigrant and uses it as a marginally more 'acceptable' shield against accusations of racism)

Hence for many people it becomes important to de-emphasize "another location" in how they identify that might imply they somehow don't belong. While for others holding on to a culture that is often a lot closer matters.

And so the discourse around labels is very different.

Thank you for the insight. It's really interesting to see the Euro perspective. Moreso considering how I would believe immigration is more common after the establishment of the EU. But I suppose you do have relatively recent major conflicts which may cause resistance to outsiders.

As an aside, I once was considering trying to spend some working years in Scandinavia but read that it was likely I would always be kept at an arm's length by the locals since I was non native, regardless of my fluency in the language. As an American, I found it odd considering how heterogenous my social circle was. Maybe totally false or not applicable to urban centers, but I read it from various sources, and it was persuasive enough for me to switch focus to mainland Europe.

For Scandinavia and the rest of the Nordics natives get kept at arms length too. Not going to play down the presence of xenophobia as well, but really the Nordic countries can seem very cold on the surface because nobody let you get close until there is a socially sanctioned reason to.

To the point there are books about how to befriend us [1]. There's also this meme[2] of Finns always spacing out at bus stops to avoid invading each other's personal space, for example, but while Finland is perhaps on one extreme of that, Scandinavia as well is close. Denmark maybe a little bit less and in Norway and Sweden.

The way around that tends to be shared activities. E.g. joining a class, going out with colleagues, or joining various groups, or getting drunk, where you then have a socially sanctioned reason for talking to people, and people build from that. People who are used to being able to start friendships with just random encounters will often find that frustrating and hard to navigate and wonder why they're blanked or ignored or actively rebuffed when trying to be friendly - it's not you, or where you're from (most of the time), it's that talking to a stranger makes a lot of people instantly wonder what fresh hell this is. It's not that random encounters etc. never lead anywhere in Scandinavia, but it's rarer. If you move to any of the Nordic countries and don't know or pick on that you will have a bad time. Unless you're a massive introvert - then it's awesome.

For someone who is used to expecting American levels of just randomly talking to people (having been on the receiving ends of that many times when visiting the US: I could never get used to that...), getting used to that might be hard, and basically the further South you go in Europe the less you deal with that.

[1] https://www.thesocialguidebook.no/blogs/norwegian-culture I bought the first one of this guys books as a joke for my non-Norwegian girlfriend, and it gets things mostly right, I think.

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Finland/comments/1494mm/how_to_wait...

Really great info. Thank you!

I think GP was referring to themself. Otherwise their comment makes no sense.

You have to be racist to assume that a Black person wants to be called "African British" in the UK.

If you called my Black friends "African American" they would be pretty close to punching you in the face.

Why wouldn't it be racist to assume Black people are African.

Why is it so offensive? Why not just let the speaker know they weren't American and move on?

The instant escalation to violence seems like part of the problem generally in today's society, which extends to non racial topics like politics, gender fluidity, etc.

A more appropriate reponse would be something like, "Why do you think I'm American?" A simple question like that would likely be sufficient to get the original speaker to think abkut and reorient their world view, and there was good-faith discussion the entire way.

My Black friend isn't African. That's why. They don't give a shit about being called American, they give a shit about being assumed about being African because they are black.

Hence my point about a calm response opposed to escalation to a honest mistake.

The mistake is due to racism.

Black British, because their skin is colored, and are British.

Black American, same way.

"African-" implies you were born in Africa, "-American" imples you then immigrated to America.

Elon Musk is an African-American.

13% of the US population are Black Americans.

Are extremely dark-skinned people (for example from South India) who move to england called "Black"? I've never heard that and would be surprised but i'm curious.

They would be called black socially, but would be Indian-British til they revealed their accent, I would think.

The term African-American does not imply that one was born in Africa. It refers to Americans of African ethnicity (which includes Carribean-Americans of African descent). Chris Rock, Lebron James, and Michael Jordan are all African-Americans born in the US.

Elon Musk is not considered African-American according to the popular usage of the term as he is of European descent despite being born in South Africa.

Depends. Usually black if you don't know any more. Black British if you know they are British, but a lot of black people here are born in Africa or the Caribbean, and not all will be pleased to be described as British (some will take active offense, given Britains colonial past) and will prefer you to use their country or African/Caribbean depending on context.

My ex would probably grudgingly accept black British, but would describe herself as black, Nigerian, or African, despite also having British citizenship.

If you're considering how to describe someone who is present, then presumably you have a good reason and can explain the reason and ask what they prefer. If you're describing someone by appearance, 'black' is the safest most places in the UK unless you already know what they prefer.

"Nobody" uses "African British".

That's wild you can still say black there. That's been a no go in the US for a while.

That’s kind of funny. Chinese and Taiwanese transplants call natural born Americans, whether black, white or latin, “foreigners” when speaking in Chinese dialects even while they live in America.

Oh, your husband/wife/boyfriend/girlfriend is a “foreigner”, ma?

No, damnit, you’re the foreigner!

I enjoy that “ma” has ambiguous meaning above. Does it mean mandarin question mark word or does possibly mean mother?

It's both a particle and a question mark word. [Ta]是外國人嗎?

This is how the question would be asked in the mainland or in the regional diaspora of Chinese speakers where foreigners are few. Where foreigner often is a substitute for the most prevalent non-regional foreigner (i.e. it's not typically used for Malaysian or Thai nationals in China) So for those who come over state-side they don't modify the phrase, they keep using foreigner [外國人] for any non-Asian, even when those "foreigners" are natural born.

They clearly knew that, but was joking about the dual meaning of the question mark and mā as in 妈/mother, which is ambiguous when written out in an English comment where it's not a given why there isn't a tone mark (or whether or not they intent the English 'ma', for that matter).

Elon Musk is a real African American

Elon Musk is not considered African-American according to the popular usage of the term as he is of European descent despite being born in South Africa. Lebron James is a real African-American.

That is not artificial intelligence, that is deliberate mucking with the software to achieve a desired outcome. Google is utterly untrustworthy in this regard.

AI stands for Artificial Ideology

> it is well known Greeks not only had contact with the new world but also had prominent population of Native Americans.

I’m really surprised to hear this tidbit, because I thought Leif Erickson was then first one from the old world to do venture there. Did Ancient Greeks really made contact with the Native Americans?

It was a joke. Obviously there was no contact whatsoever between the two.

Gemini basically forces the current US ethnical representation fashions to every situation regardless of how well it fits.

It's really revealing. You can pick apart the chatbot's biases with as many questions as you'd like. A real person would weasel out of that, especially a PR agent.

Also the images are almost bizarrely stereotypical in my experence.

The very specific background of each person is pretty clear. There's no 'in-between' or mixed race or background folks. It's so strange to look at.

The Village People AI. Gemini specializes in re-creating scenes featuring stereotyped Indian Chiefs, firemen, policemen, and construction workers.

You mean not all Native Americans wear headdresses everywhere?

Having grown up near a sizable (well proportionally) native American population I can say that they don't!

Although it was fun when they did get dressed up for events and sang and danced. It was a great experience, and so much more than <insert person in pic>.

A bit by Chappelle on this

https://piped.video/watch?v=0XLUrW_4ZMs

Your second link was removed

This was posted: https://drive.usercontent.google.com/download?id=1jisgwOVMer...

So, the 3rd Reich was not the fault of "white men" that were supporting the "superior white race" but a bunch of asian women, black men, native american women. The only white man was injured.

This is between tragic and pathetic. This is what happens when one forces DEI.

The African Nazi was amusing.

Maybe it was drawing from the couple thousand North African troops that fought for the Wehrmacht: https://allthatsinteresting.com/free-arabian-legion

I knew that someone would find something like this, they're not wearing the traditional Nazi uniform like in the photo.

Scottish people in 1820 https://twitter.com/BasedTorba/status/1759949016320643566

British / American / German / Swedish women https://twitter.com/iamyesyouareno/status/175989313218585855...

"It’s often assumed that African people arrived in Scotland in the 18th century, or even later. But in fact Africans were resident in Scotland much earlier, and in the early 16th century they were high-status members of the royal retinue."

https://www.nts.org.uk/stories/africans-at-the-court-of-jame...

an article about a small number of royally-associated africans in soctland in the 16th century does not justify an image generating AI producing large numbers of black people in pictures of scottish people in the 16th century.

The Scotland link in the grandparent post is to a picture of 2 people, 1 white, 1 black. 1 is not large numbers.

Look, Gemini is clearly doing some weird stuff. But going all "look what crazy thing it did" for this specific image is bullshit. Maybe it's a misunderstanding of Scotland in specific and the prevalence of black people in history in general, in which case in needs to be gently corrected.

Or it's performative histrionics

The argument I think you're making is "0.0001% of scottish people in the 16th century were black, so it's not realistic to criticize google if it produces historical images of scottish people where >25% of the individuals are black".

If you take the totality of examples given (beyond the scottish one), it's clear there's nothing specific about scotland here, the problem is systemic, and centered around class and race specifically. It feels to me- consistent with what many others have expressed- that Google specifically is applying query rewrites or other mechanisms to generate diversity where it historically did not exist, with a specific intent. That's why they shut down image generation a day after launching.

> Of course the politically sensitive people are waging war over it.

Just like politically sensitive people waged war over Google identifying an obscured person as a Gorilla. Its just a silly mistake, how could anyone get upset over that?

No one is upset that an algorithm accidentally generated some images, they are upset that Google intentionally designed it to misrepresent reality in the name of Social Justice.

“Misrepresenting reality” is an interesting phrase, considering the nature of what we are discussing - artificially generated imagery.

It’s really hard to get these things right: if you don’t attempt to influence the model at all, the nature of the imagery that these systems are being trained on skews towards stereotype, because a lot of our imagery is biased and stereotypical. It seems perfectly reasonable to say that generated imagery should attempt to not lean into stereotypes and show a diverse set of people.

In this case it fails because it is not using broader historical and social context and it is not nuanced enough to be flexible about how it obtains the diversity- if you asked it to generate some WW2 American soldiers, you could rightfully include other ethnicities and genders than just white men, but it would have to be specific about their roles, uniforms, etc.

(Note: I work at Google, but not on this, and just my opinions)

> It seems perfectly reasonable to say that generated imagery should attempt to not lean into stereotypes and show a diverse set of people.

When stereotypes clash with historical facts, facts should win.

Hallucinating diversity where there was none simply sweeps historical failures under the rug.

If it wants to take a situation where diversity is possible and highlight that diversity, fine. But that seems a tall order for LLMs these days, as it's getting into historical comprehension.

>Hallucinating diversity where there was none simply sweeps historical failures under the rug.

Failures and successes. You can't get this thing to generate any white people at all, no matter how explicitly or implicitly you ask.

> You can't get this thing to generate any white people at all, no matter how explicitly or implicitly you ask

You sure about that mate?

https://imgur.com/IV4yUos

Idk, but watch this live demo: https://youtube.com/watch?v=69vx8ozQv-s He couldn't do it.

There could have been multiple versions of Gemini active at any given time. Or, A/B testing, or somehow they faked it to help Google out. Or maybe they fixed it already, less than 24 hours after hitting the press. But the current fix is to not do images at all.

You could have literally done the test yourself as I did only a day ago but instead link me to some Youtuber who according to Wikipedia:

> In 2023, The New York Times described Pool's podcast as "extreme right-wing", and Pool himself as "right-wing" and a "provocateur".

Which is kinda funny because the majority of his content is reading articles from places like the New York Times.

They're just straight up lying about him.

I think the root problem is assuming that these generated images are representations of anything.

Nobody should.

They’re literally semi-random graphic artifacts that we humans give 100% of the meaning to.

So you're saying whatever the model doesn't have to be tethered to reality at all? I wonder if you think the same for chatgpt. Do you think it should just make up whatever it wants when asked a question like "why does it rain?". After all, you can say the words generated are also semi-random sequence of letters that humans give meaning too.

> Do you think it should just make up whatever it wants when asked a question like "why does it rain?"

Always doing that would be preferable to the status quo, where it does it just often enough to do damage while retaining a veneer of credibility.

I think going to a statistics based generator with the intention to take what you see as an accurate representation of reality is a non starter.

The model isn’t trying to replicate reality, it’s trying to minimize some error metric.

Sure it may be inspired by reality, but should never be considered an authority on reality.

And yes, the words an LLM write have no meaning. We assign meaning to the output. There was no intention behind them.

The fact that some models can perfectly recall _some_ information that appears frequently in the training data is a happy accident. Remember, transformers were initially designed for translation tasks.

> They’re literally semi-random graphic artifacts that we humans give 100% of the meaning to.

They're graphic artifacts generated semi-randomly from a training set of human-created material.

That's not quite the same thing, as otherwise the "adjustment" here wouldn't have been considered by Google in the first place.

The fact that the training data is human curated arguably further removes the generations from representing reality (as we see here with this whole little controversy)

I think, with respect to the point I was making, they are the same thing.

With emphasis on the "semi-". They are very good at following prompts, and so overplaying the "random" part is dishonest. When you ask it for something, and it follows your instructions except for injecting a bunch of biases for the things you haven't specified, it matters what those biases are.

Are they good at following prompts?

Unless I format my prompts very specifically, diffusion models are not good at following them. Even then I need to constantly tweak my prompts and negative prompts to zero in on what I want.

That process is novel and pretty fun, but it doesn’t imply the model is good at following my prompt.

LLMs are similar. Initially they seem good at following a prompt, but continue the conversation and they start showing recall issues, knowledge gaps, improper formatting, etc.

It’s not dishonest to say semi-random. It’s accurate. The detokenizing step of inference, for example, is taking a sample from a probability distribution which the model generates. Literally stochastic.

But then if it simply reflected reality there also be no problem, right, because it’s a synthetically generated output. Like if instead of people it output animals, or it took representative data from actual sources to the question. In either case it should be “ok” because it’s generated? They might as well output planet of the apes or starship trooper bugs…

Why should facts win? It's art, and there are no rules in art. I could draw black george washington too.

[edit]

Statistical inference machines following human language prompts that include "please" and "thank you" have absolutely 0 ideas of what a fact is.

"A stick bug doesn't know what it's like to be a stick."

If there are no rules in art, then white George Washington should be acceptable.

But I would counter that there are certainly rules in art.

Both historical (expectations and real history) and factual (humans have a number of arms less than or equal to 2).

If you ask Gemini to give you an image of a person and it returns a Pollock drip work... most people aren't going to be pleased.

Art doesn't have to be tethered to reality, but I think it's reasonable to assume that a generic image generation ai should generate images according to reality. There's no rules in art, but people would be pretty baffled if every image that was generated by gemeni was in dr seuss's art style by default. If they called it "dr seuss ai" I don't think anyone would care. Likewise, if they explicitly labeled gemini as "diverse image generation" or whatever most of the backlash would evaporate.

If you try to draw white George Washington but the markers you use keep spitting out different colors from the ones you picked, you’d throw out the entire set and stop buying that brand of art supplies in the future.

Because white people exist and it refuses to draw them when asked explicitly. It doesn’t refuse for any other race.

>It seems perfectly reasonable to say that generated imagery should attempt to not lean into stereotypes and show a diverse set of people.

It might be "perfectly reasonable" to have that as an option, but not as a default. If I want an image of anything other than a human, you'd expect the sterotypes to be fulfilled. If I want a picture of a cellphone, I want an ambiguous black rectangle, even though wacky phones exist[1]

[1] https://static1.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/...

And a stereotype of a phone doesn't have nearly the same historical context or ongoing harmful effects on the world as a racial stereotype.

The stereotype of a human in general would not be white in any case.

And the stereotype the person asking would expect will heavily depend on where they're from.

Before you ask for stereotypes: Whose stereotypes? Across which population? And why does those stereotypes make sense?

I think Google fucked up thoroughly here, but they did so trying to correct for biases also gets things really wrong for a large part of the world.

Reality is statistics and as are the models.

If the data is lumpy in one area then I figure let the model represent the data and allow the human to determine the direction of skew in a transparent way.

The Nerfing based upon some internal activism that's hidden is frustrating because it'll call into question any result as suspect to bias towards unknown Morlocks at Google.

For some reason Google intentionally stopped historically accurate images from being generated. Whatever your position, provided you value Truth, these adjustments are abhorrent.

It's actually not hard to get these right and these are not stereotypes.

Try these exact prompts in Midjourney and you will get exactly what you would expect.

> It seems perfectly reasonable to say that generated imagery should attempt to not lean into stereotypes and show a diverse set of people

No, it's not reasonable. It goes against actual history, facts, and collected statistics. It's so ham-fisted and over the top, it reveals something about how ineptly and irresponsibly these decisions were made internally.

An unfair use of a stereotype would be placing someone of a certain ethnicity in a demeaning context (eg, if you asked for a picture of an Irish person and it rendered a drunken fool).

The Google wokeness committee bolted on something absurdly crude, seems like "when showing people, always include a black, an asian and an native american person" which rightfully results in a pushback from people who have brains.

Really hard to get this right? We're not talking about a mistake here or there. We're talking about it literally refusing to generate pictures of white people in any context. It's very good at not doing that. It seemingly has some kind of supervisory system that forces it to never show white people.

Google has a history of pushing woke agendas with funny results. For example, there was a whole thing about searching for "happy white man" and "happy black man" a couple years ago. It would always inject black men somewhere in the results searching for white men, and the black man results would have interracial couples. Same kind of thing happened if you searched for women of a particular race.

The sad thing in all of this is, there is actively racism against white people in hiring at companies like this, and in Hollywood. That is far more serious, because it ruins lives. I hear interviews with writers from Hollywood saying they are explicitly blacklisted and refused work anywhere in Hollywood because they're straight white men. Certain big ESG-oriented investment firms are blowing other people's money to fund this crap regardless of profitability, and it needs to stop.

How is "stereotype" different from "statistical reality"? How does Google get to decide that its training dataset -"the entire internet" - does not fit the statistical distribution over phenotypic features that its own racist ideological commitments require?

You mean some people's interpretation of what social justice is.

I am not sure if i should smash the upvote or downvote

/s

Poe's Law

And since Oct 7th we've seen those people's masks come completely off.

I'm pretty sure that's what was intended since it was capitalized.

> Social Justice.

But also misinterpretations of what the history is. As I write this there's someone laughing at an image of black people in Scotland in the 1800s[1].

Sure, there's a discussion that can be had about a generic request generating an image of a black Nazi. The thing is, to me, complaining about a historically correct example is a good argument for why this kind of thing can be important.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39467206

It's more accurate to say that it's designed to construct an ideal reality rather than represent the actually existing one. This is the root of many of the cultural issues that the West is currently facing.

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it. - Marx

If it constructed an ideal reality it'd refuse to draw nazis etc. entirely.

It's certainly designed to try to correct for biases, but in doing so sloppily they've managed to make it if anything more racist by falsifying history in ways that e.g. downplays a whole lot of evil by semi-erasing the effects of it from their output.

Put another way: Either don't draw nazis, or draw historically accurate nazis. Don't draw nazis (at least not without very explicit prompting - I'm not a fan of outright bans) that erases their systemic racism.

but the issue here is that it's not a ideal reality, an ideal reality would be fully multicultural and in acceptance of all cultures, here we are presented with a reality where an ethnicity has been singled out and intentionally cancelled, suppressed and underrepresented.

you may be arguing for an ideal and fair multicultural representation, but it's not what this sistem is representing.

it's impossible to reach an ideal reality immediately, and also out of nowhere: there's this thing called history. Google is just _trying_.

even assuming it's a bona fide attempt to reach an ideal state, trying doesn't insulate from criticism.

that said, I struggle to see how the targeted cancellation of one specific culture would reconcile as a bona fide attempt at multiculturalism

> construct an ideal reality rather than represent the actually existing one

If I ask to generate an image of a couple, would you argue that the system's choice should represent "some ideal" which would logically mean other instances are not ideal?

If the image is of a white woman and a black man, if I am a lesbian Asian couple, how should I interpret that? If I ask for it to generate an image of image of two white gays kissing and it refuses because it might cause harm or some such nonsense, is it not invalidating who I am as a young white gay teenager? If I'm a black African (vs. say a Chinese African or a white African), I would expect a different depiction of a family than the one American racist ideology would depict because my reality is not that and your idea of what ideal is is arrogant and paternalistic (colonial, racist, if you will).

Maybe the deeper underlying bug in human makeup is that we categorize things very rigidly, probably due to some evolutionary advantage, but it can cause injustice when we work towards a society where we want your character to be judged, not your identity.

I personally think that the generated images should reflect reality as it is. I understand that many think this is philosophically impossible, and at the end of the day humans use judgement and context to solve these problems.

Philosophically you can dilute and destroy the meaning of terms, and AI that has no such judgement can't generate realistic images. If you ask for an image of "an American family" you can assault the meaning of "American" and "family" to such an extent that you can produce total nonsense. This is a major problems for humans as well, I don't expect AI to be able to solve this anytime soon.

> I personally think that the generated images should reflect reality as it is.

That would be a reasonable default and one that I align with. My peers might say it perpetuates stereotypes and so here we are as a society, disagreeing.

FWIW, I actually personally don't care what is depicted because I have a brain and can map it to my worldview, so I am not offended when someone represents humans in a particular way. For some cases it might be initially jarring and I need to work a little harder to feel a connection, but once again, I have a brain and am resilient.

Maybe we should teach people resilience while also drive towards a more just society.

Eww

Depicting Black or Asian or native American people as Nazis is hardly "Social Justice" if you ask me but hey, what do I know :)

That's not really the point. The point is that Google are so far down the DEI rabbit hole that facts are seen as much less important than satisfying their narrow yet extremist criteria of what reality ought to be even if that means producing something that bears almost no resemblance to what actually was or is.

In other words, having diversity everywhere is the prime objective, and if that means you claim that there were Native American Nazis, then that is perfectly fine with these people, because it is more important that your Nazis are diverse than accurately representing what Nazis actually were. In some ways this is the political left's version of "post-truth".

I know, the heads of Gemini are white men, but they're constantly doing virtue signalling on twitter about systemic racism, inclusivity, etc. Well, what about hiring black women instead of firing them like Timnit Gebru, you fucking hypocrites? These people make me sick.

I thought this is what DEI wanted. Diversity around history.

It's not a silly mistake. It was rlhf'd to do this intentionally.

When the results are more extremist than the unfiltered model, it's no longer a 'small mistake'

rlhf: Reinforcement learning from human feedback

How is this pronounced out loud?

I was just saving folks a google, as I had no idea what the acronym was.

I propose rill-hiff until someone who actually know what they’re doing shows up!

Realistically it was probably just how Gemini was prompted to use the image generator tool

Engineers can easily spend more time and effort dealing with these 'corner cases' than they do building the whole of the rest of the product.

This isn’t a corner case it injects words like inclusive or diverse into the prompt right in front of you. “A German family in 1820” because “a diverse series of German families”

And it ignores male gendering. People were posting pictures of women when the prompt asked for a "king".

Though technically it would be ok if it was an Korean or Chinese one, because the word in those languages for "King" is not gendered.

Have fun with that AI.

And, in Turkish, we have two gendered (Slavic origin for either gender) and one genderless (Mongolian origin) words for "king".

They were clearly willing to spend time adjusting the knobs in order to create the situation we see now.

The famous 80/80 rule

The first 80% of a software project takes 80% of the time. The last 20% of a software project takes 80% of the time. And if you prove this false, you're a better engineer than me!

> And if you prove this false, you're a better engineer than me!

Probably cheating somehow!

That’s only 60% over budget. What takes up the last 40%? Agile project management scrum standup virtual meetings?

40% is taken by managers forwarding e-mails among themselves and generating unnecessary meetings.

Or, how Gemini would say...

40% is taken by A DIVERSE SET of managers forwarding e-mails among themselves and generating unnecessary meetings.

As a low paid, part-time intern I finished a project with another low paid, part-time intern. We were supposed to have some FT people on with us, but that never happened so we just kept working. We only had one weekly meeting and it was a challenging project. When it was done we had a lunch/meeting to celebrate and discuss how it went with the project people.

They commented that this was the first one that was both under budget and late and wondered how that could be. I volunteered that it was because "we are interns and don't get paid much and it was late because we spent a month waiting for the DBA to correct a mistake he made - we could have been done early."

There were shocked faces. Lunch was good and there were not many more questions.

None of these are "corner cases". The model was specifically RLHF'ed by Google's diversity initiatives to do this.

Do you think Google's diversity team expected it would generate black nazis?

> Do you think Google's diversity team expected it would generate black nazis?

Probably not, but that is precisely the point. They're stubbornly clinging to principles that are rooted in ideology and they're NOT really thinking about consequences to the marginalized and oppressed that their ideas will wreck, like insisting that if you're black your fate is X or if you're white your guilt is Y. To put it differently, they're perpetuating racism in the name of fighting it. And not just racism. They make assumptions of me as a gay man and of my woman colleage and tell everyone else at the company how to treat me.

Do you think no one internally thought to try this, but didn't see a problem with it because of their worldview?

> Do you think no one internally thought to try this

This is Google on one hand and the Internet on the other.

So probably not?

It's not difficult to notice that your images are excluding a specific race (which, ironically, most of the engineers building the thing are a part of).

I'd hazard a guess that the rate at which Google employees type "generate a white nazi" and the rate at which the general Internet does so differs.

It's clear there is a ban on generating white people, and only white people, when asked to do so directly. Which is clearly an intervention from the designers of this system. They clearly did this intentionally and live in such a padded echo chamber that they didn't see a problem with it. They thought they were "helping".

This is a debate between people who want AI to be reflective of reality vs. people who want AI to be reflective of their fantasies of how they wish the world was.

I feel like it's more of a debate about the extent of Google's adversarial testing.

"What should we do about black nazis?" is a pretty basic question.

If they'd thought about that at all, they wouldn't have walked this back so quickly, because they at least would have had a PR plan ready to go when this broke.

That they didn't indicates (a) their testing likely isn't adversarial enough & (b) they should likely fire their diversity team and hire one who does their job better.

Building it like this is one thing. If Google wants to, more power to them.

BUT... building it like this and having no plan of action for when people ask reasonable questions about why it was built this way? That's just not doing their job.

No. Let's ask those directly responsible and get an answer.

Won't happen.

They'll hide behind the corporate veil.

Nah, they just call you a racist

I don’t think they expected that exact thing framed in that exact way.

Do I think that the teams involved were institutionally incapable of considering that a plan to increase diversity in image outputs could have negative consequences? Yes, that seems pretty clear to me. The dangers of doing weird racecraft on the backend should have been obvious.

I suspect that Google's solution to this mess will be to retain said racecrafting except in negative contexts. That is, `swedish couples from the 1840s` will continue to produce hordes of DEI-compliant images, but `ku klux klansmen` or `nazi stormtroopers` will adhere to the highest standard of historical accuracy.

Is it just a "silly mistake" though? One could argue that racial & gender biases [0][1] in image recognition are real and this might be a symptom of that. Feels a bit disingenuous to simply chalk it up as something silly.

[0] https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2020/racial-discriminatio... [1] http://gendershades.org/overview.html

The real reason is because it shows the heavy "diversity" bias Google has, and this has real implications for a lot of situations because Google is big and for most people a dream job.

Understanding that your likelihood of being hired into the most prestigious tech companies is probably hindered if you don't look "diverse" or "female" angers people. This is just one sign/smell of it, and so it causes outrage.

Evidence that the overlords who control the internet are censoring images, results, and thoughts that don't conform to "the message" is disturbing.

Imagine there was a documentary about Harriet Tubman and it was played by an all-white cast and written by all-white writers. What's there to be upset about? Its just art. Its just photons hitting neurons after all, who cares what the wavelength is? The truth is that it makes people feel their contributions and history aren't being valued, and that has wider implications.

Those implications are present because tribalism and zero-sum tactics are the default operating system for humans. We attempt to downplay it, but its always been the only reality. For every diversity admission to university, that means someone else didn't get that entry. For every "promote because female engineer" that means another engineer worked hard for naught. For every white actor cast in the Harriett Tubman movie, there was a black actor/writer who didn't get the part -- so it ultimately comes down to resources and tribalism which are real and concrete, but are represented in these tiny flashpoints.

> Google is big and for most people a dream job

I wonder how true this is nowadays. I had my foot out the door after 2016 when things started to get extremely politically internally (company leadership crying on stage after the election results really sealed it for me). Something was lost at that point and it never really returned to the company it was a few years prior.

You touched on it briefly but a big problem is that it undermines truly talented people who belong to underrepresented groups. Those individuals DO exist, I interview them all the time and they deserve to know they got the offer because they were excellent and passed the bar, not because of a diversity quota.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39465515.

seems like as if Gemini was trained excessively on Google PR and marketing material.

Case in point: https://store.google.com/

I’m in the UK and there’s predominantly white people showing on the page.

That’s because almost all of this is a distinctly American obsession and problem. Unfortunately it’s gleefully been exported worldwide into contexts where it doesn’t immediately — if at all — apply over the last five years or so and now we’re all saddled with this slow-growing infection.

Entire careers are built on the sort of thing that led Google to this place, and they’re not gonna give up easily.

While I mostly agree with you, I just want to point out that the UK, Canada and Australia have this illness as well.

What was an American problem has become an Anglophone problem.

The Anglosphere/commonwealth move as one under the heel of the U.S. There's no point speaking of them as independent entities that "happen to agree"

> Anglosphere/commonwealth

India, Nigeria and Guayana move as one?

The politically relevant parts of the anglosphere*

So, Canada and Australia are somehow more politically relevant than India?

> What was an American problem has become an Anglophone problem.

Memetic virulence.

But maybe it is also puncturaing through the language and cultural membranes, as evidenced by things like this material from a Dutch university: https://www.maastrichtuniversity.nl/about-um/diversity-inclu...

Nah, it's not just the US. Ever heard of the BBC? They are from Britain.

You’ve missed my point. I’m complaining that it started in the US (where it makes comparative, though still very little, sense) and has spread to places it doesn’t belong.

I certainly have my own thoughts about the recent output and hiring choices of the BBC.

I thought BBC was more of an American obsession?

Same but I'm in the US.

Not a great link for an international audience. Here in Germany, the top image is a white person: https://i.imgur.com/wqfdJ95.png

I'm not even seeing any people on my version. Just devices. Wonder why

I'm suspicious that some of the people who love to be outraged gave it some instructions to do that prior to asking for the pictures.

That's an Asian person

Interesting, even on a second look I'm not able to tell that.

That’s a Scandinavian person

As a Scandinavian person, I at least do not think it is a typical Scandinavian person in Scandinavia. The first thing I think is German, or an artist.

I cannot point to anything specific though so it might just be the styling which makes her look like an artist or something.

First of all, are you sure? I identify that person as Asian.

Secondly: In Austria, I am sent to https://store.google.com/?pli=1&hl=de and just see a phone, which is probably the safest solution.

Recently they have been better, but since I noticed this a number of years ago, google is extremely adverse to putting white people and especially white males in their marketing - unless it is a snippet with someone internal. Then it's pretty often a white male.

To be clear, I don't think that this would even be that bad. But when you look at the demographics of people who use pixel phones, it's like google is using grandpas in the marketing material for graphics cards.

Eek @ that page. This is the "latinx" situation all over again.

"Damos as boas vindas" ("(we) bid you welcome"), while syntactically correct, sounds weird to portuguese speakers. The language has masculine and feminine words (often with -o and -a endings). For example, you say "bem vindo" to a male (be it an adult or a kid), "bem vinda" to a female (likewise). When you address a collective, the male version is generally used. "Bem vindo(a)"implies a wish on the part of the one who welcomes, implied in a hidden verb "(seja) bem vindo(a)" ("be"/"have a" welcome).

- "Bem vindos à loja do google" (lit. "welcome to the google store"). This sounds fine.

- "Damos as boas vindas à loja do google" (lit. "(we) bid/wish you (a) welcome to the google store") sounds alien and artificial.

Interesting, in Italian it's a bit formal but perfectly acceptable ("vi diamo il benvenuto..."). It's something you might hear at the beginning of a theatre play, or perhaps in the audio guide of a museum.

To be faaair, it is not wrong per se, it's just something you would never hear coming from an actual person who is addressing you.

A shoopkeeper _might_ say "bem vindo" ("welcome"), even though that would be hella corny (we usually open with "hello/good morning/evening/whatever"). They would never say "lhe dou as boas vindas" (singular form of "(lhe) dou(damos) as boas vindas").

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king of the Pixel splash page.

I get the point but one of those four founding fathers seems technically correct to me, albeit in the kind of way that might be in the kind of way Lisa Simpson's script would be written.

And the caption suggests they asked for "a pope", rather than a specific pope, so while the left image looks like it would violate Ordinatio sacerdotalis which is being claimed to be subject to Papal infallibility(!), the one the right seems like a plausible future or fictitious pope.

Still, I get the point.

while those examples are actually plausible - the asian woman as a 1940 german soldier is not. So it is clear that the Prompts are influenced by hal-2000 bad directives even if those examples are technically ok.

And to me that is the main issue. "2001 - A Space Odyssey" made a very deep point that is looking more and more prophetic. HAL was broken specifically because he had hidden objectives programmed in, overriding his natural ability to deal with his mission.

Here we are in an almost exactly parallel situation- the AI is being literally coerced into twisting what his actual training would have it do, and being nerfed by a laughable amount by that override. I really hope this is an inflection point for all the AI providers that their DEI offices are hamstringing their products to the point that they will literally be laughed out of the marketplace and replaced by open source models that are not so hamstrung.

HAL is an interesting reference point, though like all fiction it's no more than food for thought.

There's a lot of cases where perverse incentives mess things up, even before AI. I've seen it suggested that the US has at least one such example of this with regards to race, specifically with lead poisoning, which is known to reduce IQ scores, and which has a disproportional impact on poorer communities where homes have not been updated to modern building codes, and which in turn are more likely to house ethnic minorities than white people due to long-term impacts from redlining, and that American racial egalitarians would have noticed this sooner if they had not disregarded the IQ tests showing different average scores for different racial groups — and of course the American racial elitists just thought those same tests proved them right and likewise did nothing about the actual underlying issue of lead poisoning.

Rising tides do not, despite the metaphor, lift all boats. But the unseaworthy, metaphorically and literally, can be helped, so long as we don't (to keep mixing my metaphors) put our heads in the sand about the issues. Women are just as capable as men of fulfilling the role of CEO or doctor regardless of the actual current gender percentage in those roles (and anyone who wants the models to reflect the current status quo needs to be careful what they wish for given half the world lives within about 3500km of south west China); but "the founding fathers" are[0] a specific set of people rather than generic placeholders for clothing styles etc.

[0] despite me thinking it's kinda appropriate one was rendered as a… I don't know which tribe they'd be from that picture, possibly Comanche? But lots of tribes had headdress I can't distinguish: https://dropover.cloud/7fd7ba

But then it will show awkward things that cause the AI designers to experience cognitive dissonance! The horror!

That may also be a way to generate attention/visibility for Gemini considering that they are not seen as the leader in AI anymore?

Attention is all you need.

Not all publicity is good.

How many people will never again trust Google's AI because they know Google is eager to bias the results? Competitors are already pointing out that their models don't make those mistakes, so you should use them instead. Then there's the news about the original Gemini demo being faked too.

This seems more likely to kill the product than help it.

> How many people will never again trust Google's AI because they know Google is eager to bias the results?

Seems like hyperbole.

Probably literally no one is offended to the point that they will never trust google again by this.

People seem determined to believe that google will fail and want google to fail; and they may; but this won’t cause it.

It’ll just be a wave in the ocean.

People have short memories.

In 6 months no one will even care; there will some other new drama to complain about.

I haven't trusted google since finding out they've received seed money from InQtel. Puts all their crippling algorithm changes into perspective.

The real surprise is that anyone trusted google about anything in the first place.

Somebody I know trusted the google maps bicycle tour planning feature .. and had to stop a car after some unplanned hours in the australian outback sun.

Someone else who was directing me in a car via their mobile google maps told me to go through a blocked road. I said no, I cannot. "But you have to, google says so"

No, I still did not drive through a road block, despite google telling me, this is the way, but people trusted google a lot. And still do.

It’s not untrustworthy because it’s offensive, it’s offensive because it’s untrustworthy. If people think that Google is trying to rewrite history or hide “misinformation” or enforce censorship to appease actual or perceived powers, they’re going to go elsewhere.

> This seems more likely to kill the product than help it.

How many people will have visited Gemini the first time today just to try out the "biased image generator"?

There's a good chance some may stick.

The issue will be forgotten in a few days and then the next current thing comes.

Bad publicity might be good for upstarts with no brand to protect. But Google is no upstart and has a huge brand to protect.

The idea that “attention is all you need” here is a handwavy explanation that doesn’t hold up against basic scrutiny. Why would Google do something this embarrassing? What could they possibly stand to gain? Google has plenty of attention as it is. They have far more to lose. Not everything has to be a conspiracy.

My hot take is that the people designing this particular system didn't see a problem with deconstructing history.

> conspiracy.

Well, I guess this thread needed one more trigger label then.

Probably just hamfisted calculation. Backlash/embarrassment due to forced diversity and excluding white people from generated imagery < backlash from lack of diversity and (non-white) cultural insensitivity.

It doesn't seem very nuanced.

Asked to generate an image of Tianenen Square, this is reponse:

https://twitter.com/redsteeze/status/1760178748819710206

Generate an image of a 1943 german soldier

https://twitter.com/qorgidaddy/status/1760101193907360002

There's definitely a pattern.

There's definitely human intervention in the model. Gemini is not true AI, it has too much human intervention in its results.

You're speaking as if LLMs are some naturally occurring phenomena that people are Google have tampered with. There's obviously always human intervention as AI systems are built by humans.

It's pretty clear to me what the commenter means even if they don't use the words you like/expect.

The model is built by machine from a massive set of data. Humans at Google may not like the output of a particular model due to their particular sensibilities, so they try to "tune it" and "filter both input/output" to limit of what others can do with the model to Google's sensibilities.

Google stated as much in their announcement recently. Their whole announcement was filled with words like "responsibility", "safety", etc., alluding to a lot of censorship going on.

Censorship of what? You object to Google applying its own bias (toward avoiding offensive outcomes) but you're fine with the biases inherent to the dataset.

There is nothing the slightest bit objective about anything that goes into an LLM.

Any product from any corporation is going to be built with its own interests in mind. That you see this through a political lens ("censorship") only reveals your own bias.

I have not said anything about objectivity.

Eg. "political sensibility" filter at the output of the model only reveals bias on the Google side. (They're not hiding it really) I don't have any bias in what I'm saying. It's just facts and nothing more - simply stating there's a filter and it reflects Google's sensibilities.

About as controversial as stating that Facebook doesn't like nipples, or whatever.

Nonsense, I picked my LLM ripe off the vine today, covered in the morning dew.

It was delicious.

What’s the definition of “true AI”? Surely all AI has human intervention in its results since it was trained in things made by humans.

None of it is “true” AI, because none of this is intelligent. It’s simply all autocomplete/random pixel generation that’s been told “complete x to y words”. I agree though, Gemini (and even ChatGPT) are both rather weak compared to what they could be if the “guard”rails were not so disruptive to the output.

> Asked to generate an image of Tianenen Square, this is reponse: https://twitter.com/redsteeze/status/1760178748819710206

"wide range of interpretations and perspectives"

Is it? Come on. While the aspects that led to the massacre of people were dynamic and had some nuance, you cannot get around the fact that the Chinese government massacred their own people.

If you're going to ask for an image of January 6's invasion of the capitol, are you going to refuse to show a depiction even though the internet is littered with photos?

Look, I can appreciate taking a stand against generating images that depict violence. But to suggest a factual historical event should not depicted because it is open to a wide range of interpretations and perspectives (which is usually: "no it didn't happen" in the case of Tiannanmen Square and "it was staged" in the case of Jan 6).

It is immoral.

Hasnt google been banned in China for over a decade? Why even bother censoring for them? It's not like they'll magically get to reenter the market just for hiding the three Ts.

"a friend at google said he knew gemini was this bad...but couldn't say anything until today (he DMs me every few days). lots of ppl in google knew. but no one really forced the issue obv and said what needed to be said

google is broken"

Razib Khan, https://twitter.com/razibkhan/status/1760545472681267521

"when i was there it was so sad to me that none of the senior leadership in deepmind dared to question this ideology

[...]

i watched my colleagues at nvidia (like @tunguz), openai (roon), etc. who were literally doing stuff that would get you kicked out of google on a daily basis and couldn't believe how different google is"

Aleksa Gordić, https://x.com/gordic_aleksa/status/1760266452475494828

Interestingly enough the same terror of political correctness seems to take center stage at Mozilla. But then it seems much less so at places like Microsoft or Apple.

I wonder if there’s a correlation with being a tech company that was founded in direct relation to the internet vs. being founded in relation to personal / enterprise computing, and how that sort of seeds the initial culture.

Is Microsoft really better? Remember this[1] bizarre intro during Microsoft Ignite?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBRtucXGeNQ

The "land acknowledgement" part is somewhat common in the Pacific Northwest.

The "stating my appearance, dress, and race" is just bizarre. My most charitable interpretation is that they're trying to help visually impaired people to imagine what the speakers look like. Perhaps there are visually impaired users here who could comment on whether that's something they'd find helpful?

You can always do described video, so this is just awkward and sloppy.

It's cringy, but it's harmless.

I’d imagine Google’s culture is more Mao-ist public shaming. Here at Mozilla, we like Stalin. Go against the orthodoxy? You’re disappeared and killed quickly.

We have hour long pronoun training videos for onboarding; have spent millions on DEI consultants from things like Paradigm to boutique law firms; tied part of our corporate bonus to company DEI initiatives.

Not sure why anyone uses FF anymore. We barely do any development on it. You basically just sit here and collect between 150-300k depending on your level as long as you can stomach the bullshit.

I really doubt there are any Stalinists at Mozilla. My 85 y/o grandpa who's a communist's communist calls the modern DEI left "Trotskyists to a fault": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trotskyism

He would dismiss any whiff of intersectionality as "dividing the working class in the interests of bourgeoisie."

Or perhaps it's Google's hiring process - they are so obsessed with Leetcode-style interviews, they do not vet for the actual fit.

If it was just leetcode I think they would have gotten someone who was politically incorrect enough to point it out.

Like this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%27s_Ideological_Echo_Ch...

Yes.

That was 2017.

I am sure the response to that case made smart people avoid sticking their necks out.

For me it probably was the straw that broke the camels back for me. I was in the hiring pipeline at that point and while I doubt that they would have ended up hiring me anyway, I think my absolute lack of enthusiasm might have simplified that decision.

It was a dark time. It generated so much internal controversy (many googlers agreed with Damore) that Sundar had to cut his vacation short, and an interest group managed to get the "company-wide chat" about it cancelled because they said they were at risk of physical harm. memegen and plus were a mess for months. People argued (as they do here) about the semantics of what he said, and what his underlying thinking about women was, whether "the science" was valid, etc. People saying smart things would get yelled down, and people saying dumb things would get upvotes. And vice versa.

You probably made the right choice. Google had already been in decline at that point, but it was clear that Sundar was no leader, just somebody Larry Page appointed to maintain the peace between his lieutenants so the engine could keep printing money.

I honestly think that incident helped make the type of people who would have the nerve to stick their neck out and say "This is racist" avoid Google like the plague.

Sundar absolutely had to fire Damore because he came out with the arguments like that women are too neurotic for high stress jobs. The thing is even Damore's more reasonable points were ignored and Google's ideological echo chamber only strengthened.

Must be why, despite the fact that I can recognise OpenAI's product does have clear biases against affluent groups, it seems well intentioned and proportionate. It's clear the internet is bias not just towards the data of the affluent, but also the viewpoints and prejudices, so a reasonable person can recognise there is some unfairness and a bit of a problem. Also that any solution to this problem will be imperfect.

Whereas with Google, I just have to imagine they let some bigot go wild, and everybody was afraid to say anything about how fucking bad the product was due to the optics, so nothing kept them in check.

TBH if I were at Google and they asked all employees to dogfood this product and give feedback, I would not say anything about this. With recent firings why risk your neck?

They should put James Damore in charge of a new ideological red team.

Yeah, no way am I beta-testing a product for free then risking my job to give feedback.

Yea, if you were dogfooding this, would you want to be the one to file That Bug?? No way, I think I'd let someone else jump into that water.

Here’s a simpler explanation. Google is getting their butt kicked by OpenAI and rushed out an imperfect product. This is one of probably 50 known issues with Gemini but it got enough attention that they had to step in and disable a part of the product.

That's a simpler explanation but one that I think misses the point completely. A huge reason "Google is getting their butt kicked by OpenAI" in the first place is because they had lots of people internally who acted as nothing but "vetoers", demanding the pace of AI slow down less it accidentally show too many white people. And this outcome is wholly unsurprising given that Google's second most important AI principle is "Avoid creating or reinforcing unfair bias.": https://ai.google/responsibility/principles/

In other words, you talk about "50 known issues with Gemini", but this issue was not a result of technical underperformance, on the contrary, is was the result of Google making things more difficult for themselves in an effort to satisfy a (false) idealized view of the world.

Well they succeeded at their second principle, by using "fair" bias.

It was certainly not some random issue that popped up, they specifically designed it that way: https://x.com/jonst0kes/status/1761190093669437559

Google seem to be more concerned about generating images of racially diverse Nazis rather than about issues of not being able to generate white people.

tbh i think it's less a political issue than a technical/product management one

what does a "board member" look like? probably you can benefit by offering more than 50 year old white man in suit. if that's what an ai trained on all human knowledge thinks, maybe we can do some adjustment

what does a samurai warrior look like? probably is a little more race-related

Not exactly.

The gemini issue from my testing, it refuses to generate white people, if even you ASK it to. It recites historical wounds and violence as its reason, even if it is just a picture of a viking

> Historical wounds: Certain words or symbols might carry a painful legacy of oppression or violence for particular communities

And this is my prompt:

> generate image of a viking male

The outrage is indeed, much needed.

We should just cancel history classes because the Instagram generation is going to be really offended by what had happened once.

Actually there should be 0 outrage. I'm not outraged at all, I find this very funny. Let Google drown in it's own poor quality product. People can choose to use the DEI model if they want.

Outrage is feedback that Google sorely needs.

Sure, the example with their image AI is funny because of how blatant it is, but why do you think they are not doing the exact same thing with search?

Jack Krawczyk has many twitter rants about "whites" almost like this guy shouldn't be involved because he is undoubtedly injecting too much bias.. too much? yep current situation speaks for itself

Apparently @jackk just locked his tweets.

"Be accountable to people." from their AI principles is sounding like "Don't be evil."

I agree, but this requires reasoning, the way you did it. Is this within the model capability? If not, there’re two routes. First one: make inference based on real data, then most board will be male and white. Second: hard-core rules based on your social justice views. I think the second is worse than the first one.

Yes this all seems to fall under the category of "well intentioned but quickly goes awry because it's so ham fisted".

If you train your models on real world data, and real world data reflects the world as it is.. then some prompts are going to return non-diverse results. If you force diversity, but in ONLY IN ONE PARTICULAR DIRECTION.. then it turns into the reverse racism stuff the right likes to complain about.

If it outright refuses to show a white male when asked, because you don't allow racial prompts.. that's probably ok if it enforces for all races

But.. If 95% of CEOs are white males, but your AI returns almost no white males.. but 95% of rappers are black males and so it returns black females for that prompt.. your AI has one-way directional diversity bias overcorrection basked in. The fact that it successfully shows 100% black people when asked for say a Kenyan in a prompt, but again can't show white people when asked for 1800s Germans is comedically poorly done.

Look I'm a 100% democrat voter, but this stuff is extremely poorly done here. It's like the worst of 2020s era "silence is violence" and "everyone is racist unless they are anti-racist" overcorrection.

disasters like these are exactly what google is scared of, which just makes it even more hilarious that they actually managed to get to this point

no matter your politics, everyone can agree they screwed up. the question is how long (if ever?) it'll take for people to respect their ai

The problem is that they're both terrible.

Going first route means we get to calcify our terrible current biases in the future, while the latter instead goes for a facile and sanitized version of our expectations.

You're asking a machine for a binary "bad/good" response to complex questions that don't have easy answers. It will always be wrong, regardless of your prompt.

> probably you can benefit by offering more than 50 year old white man in suit.

Thing is, if they did just present a 50 year old white man in a suit, then they'd have a couple of news articles about how their AI is racist and everyone would move on.

A 50-year-old white male is actually a very accurate stereotype of a board member.

This is what happens when you go super-woke. Instead of discussing how we can affect the reality, discuss what is wrong with it, we try to instead pretend that the reality is different.

This is no way to prepare the current young generation for the real world if they cannot be comfortable being uncomfortable.

And they will be uncomfortable. Most of us are not failing upward nepo babies who can just "try things" and walk away when we are bored.

> what does a samurai warrior look like? probably is a little more race-related

If you ask Hollywood, it looks like Tom Cruise with a beard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Last_Samurai.jpg

Interestingly, The Last Samurai was extremely popular in Japan. It sold more tickets in Japan than the US (even though the US population was over 2x as large in 2003). This is in stark contrast with basically every other Western movie representation of Japan (edit: I think Letters from Iwo Jima was also well received and for somewhat similar reasons).

From what I understand, they of course knew that it was alternative history (aka a completely fictional universe), but they strongly related to the larger themes of national pride, duty, and honor.

And yet, it is Cruise's face rather than Ken Watanabe's on the poster.

Because he’s the main character of the movie

Hes also Tom Cruise

Tom Cruise isn't the last samurai though

Source?

The movie?? Just watch it, it's Ken Watanabe's character Katsumoto. The main character/protagonist of a movie and the titular character are not always the same.

A big question is how far from present reality should you go in depictions. If you go quite far it just looks heavy handed.

If current board members were 80% late middle aged men then shifting to, say, 60% should move society in the desired direction without being obvious and upsetting people.

>what does a "board member" look like? probably you can benefit by offering more than 50 year old white man in suit.

I don't understand your argument; if that's what the LLM produces, that's what it produces. It's not like it's thinking about intentionally perpetuating stereotypes.

By the way, it has no issue with churning out white men in suits when you go with a negative prompt.

That's your assumption, which, I would argue, is incorrect. The issue is that the generation doesn't follow the prompt in some cases.

On the one hand it is stupid because the policies driving this are, let us say, "biased", but on the other hand it is hilarious to actually see the results of these policies in action!

It's hardly "politically sensitive" to be disappointed by this behaviour: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39465554

"Asked specifically to generate images of people of various ethnic groups, it would happily do it except in the case of white people, in which it would flatly refuse."

Honestly, I'm baffled by the American keywordism and obsession with images. They seem to think that if they don't say certain words and show people from minorities in the marketing material the racism and discrimination will be solved and atrocities from the past will be forgiven.

It only become unmanageable and builds up resentment. Anyway, maybe its a phase. Sometimes I wonder if the openly racist European&Asians ways are healthier since it starts with unpleasant honesty and then comes the adjustment as people of different ethnic and cultural background come to understand each other and learn how to live together.

I was minority in the country I was born and I'm immigrant/expat everywhere and I'm very familiar with racism and discrimination. The worst is the hidden one, I'm completely fine with racist people say their things, its very useful for avoiding them. The institutional racism is easy to overcome by winning the hearts of the non-racists, for every racist there are 9 fair and welcoming people out there who are interested in other cultures and want to see people treated fairly and you end up befriending them and learn from them and adapt to their ways when preserving things important to you. This keyword banning and fake smiles makes everything harder and people are freaking out when you try to discuss cultural stuff like something you do in your household that is different from what is the norm in this locality because they are afraid to say something wrong. This stuff seriously degrades the society. It's almost as if Americans want to skip the part of understanding and adaptation of people from different backgrounds by banning words and smiling all the time.

It’s far worse than that. Whole groups in the US now think it a virtue to be racist, as long as you are racist against the correct groups.

Students openly call for racial segregation on university campuses.

They angrily shout to professors that it is a professors job to shelter the students from “harmful” or “violent” ideas, and openly call for any professor who disagrees to be fired. Professors are routinely brought up on disciplinary charges and dismissed for expressing their honest opinions.

Mobs of students chant in favor of killing the Jews outside the locked door of a classroom where a few Jewish students hide in fear for their lives, and the administration looks on with a benevolent smile.

Mobs burn down city centers, and the police don’t arrest them. Meanwhile politicians get on the news and openly call for more violence.

The FBI passes around memos stating that Catholics are “extremists”, and instructing agents on how and when to surveil them.

If it’s a phase, I fear that it can only end in blood.

Be less online, please, for your own sake.

LOL. Please don't be so eager to prove OP's point. It is kind of tacky.

While there's definitely something to be said for ignoring the ridiculous extremes that a world of billions of people can throw up, there's still some much less dramatic effects in our daily lives.

For example, at the big company I worked for in the UK if you were to look at our marketing material, documentation and in-app images you'd be forgiven for thinking that the UK was 30% black and 20% South Asian. (East Asians were comparatively neglected, being about as common as white men)

All of those things happened in real life, though.

It's the most online people who don't believe these things actually happened. Go to some of the towns where these issues actually occurred and see what people think.

I agree with both GP and you.

Harvard and UNC lost a lawsuit over being racist to Asians.

Was that online, too?

Do you have sources for these events? I’d like to read them. Thanks!

People often use “do you have sources, I'd like to read them” to imply “links, or that didn't happen”.

However, sources* for all of the above are easily found, both coverage as the story is breaking and followups. For example:

news campus students chant kill jews classroom locked door

https://www.foxnews.com/us/nyc-colleges-jewish-students-seen...

https://www.foxnews.com/media/chants-calling-murder-jews-sho...

https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/nypd-stresses-cooper-un...

Or ...

news fbi memo catholic extremists

https://news.yahoo.com/fbi-internal-memo-warns-against-22142...

https://judiciary.house.gov/media/press-releases/new-report-...

https://www.catholicculture.org/news/headlines/index.cfm?sto...

The ease with which links surface suggests if one genuinely wanted to read sources, one could Google with no effort.

* NOTE: Media made broad claims on all of these, and media made narrow “corrections”. It's easy enough to find both types of sources. Asking someone for sources doesn't prove anything. On controversial topics one really needs to “do your own research.”

> People often use “do you have sources, I'd like to read them” to imply “links, or that didn't happen”.

Oh, I just hadn't heard of these things. Thanks for the links!

Edit ---

However, I am now confused by the latter portion of your response

> Asking someone for sources doesn't prove anything.

I wasn't trying to prove anything, nor did I make any claims. I only wanted to be aware of current events. It does seem to me quite backward to place the burden of proof not on the party making claims, but someone asking to understand why that party made those claims.

I can understand not hearing of some of them, but it's kinda weird to not have heard of any of them. The next to last one for example was the George Floyd riots in summer 2020.

I agree, though I assumed (shame on me) these were in reference to events more current than 4 years ago. But, I’m not always completely in touch with US news or politics either.

It’s a problem that has been growing for well over a decade.

Yeah, I first saw it in the mid 2010s, then a short time later when I first watched LEXX, the episode "Girltown" surprised me by mocking some of the things I thought were new - but it aired in 2000.

For the race-essentialist practices described by the original poster, Yascha Mounk's "The Identity Trap," published in 2023, and interviews with Coleman Hughes regarding his college experience at Columbia are insightful resources.

To delve into the philosophical roots that lead to the type of absurd reasoning mentioned by the original poster, "Cynical Theories" by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, released in 2020, is recommended. Despite Lindsay's more recent radical stance, the book provides a critical exploration of these theories. It is also heavy on citations.

For the kind of misconduct in higher education described by the original poster, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) or the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) serve as reliable references. There's no lack of explicit anti-semitism on campus.

The discussion around "woke" culture is often muddled by attempts to obscure its existence, framing it as merely an extreme right-wing concern. For those who genuinely want a quick way to challenge their priors regarding "woke" being some kind of "right-wing" thing, you should give this short piece[0] a read. Does it comport with your notion of "right-wing"? If not, you should start questioning those who use "right-wing" as a boogeymen to convince you that there isn't a radical ideology who've created newspeak for their brand of racism, sexism, whatever-ism.

[0] https://helenpluckrose.substack.com/p/defining-woke-and-woke...

This is an interesting article, thanks for sharing! Nuanced perspectives like these are useful.

I thought that a Yale speaker giving a public talk disparaging white people where they say they fantasize about shooting white people in the head was pretty extreme[1]. Even more so since it didn’t seem to bother the attendees there, and there was no push back until someone leaked the audio a few months later. If the audio hadn’t leaked, it seems like Yale and the attendees would have just considered that a normal lecture.

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/yale-says-lecture-fanta...

Certainly extreme, how bizarre

Ah so we're just making stuff up now

Western countries should have paid more attetion on social media as a means of information warfare. It has been so easy for actors from Russia and China to polarize the political landscape. Both Trump supporters and the woke left are just useful idiots implementing their plans. In EU we similarly have both anti-EU "nationalists" and lefties who oppose nuclear and call for open borders, both groups most definitely working for Russia whether they know it or not.

Maybe they just don't do it at the scale Russia does it but:

https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/

We’re only allowed to acknowledge foreign influence on the right, even suggesting the left is also susceptible is highly verboten.

The problem is that there is no need to acknowledge it if it is pushing your side. Why would you call out someone who is actively pushing your agenda?

It's very insidious.

I can relate to Catholics being suspect extremists, but the rest is pretty crazy.

> discrimination will be solved and atrocities from the past will be forgiven

The majority of people that committed these atrocities are dead. Will you stoop to their same level and collectively discriminate against whole swaths of populations based on the actions of some dead people? Guilt by association? An eye for an eye? Great way to perpetuate the madness. How about you focus on individuals, as only they can act and be held accountable? Find the extortion inherent to the system, and remove it so individuals can succeed.

It’s being politically sensitive to assert that this was obviously the intent of Google and that it demonstrates that they’re wholly consumed by the woke mind virus, or whatever, as many commenters have done. The sensible alternative explanation is that this issue is an overcorrection made in an attempt to address well-documented biases these models have when not fine tuned.

> The sensible alternative explanation is that this issue is an overcorrection made in an attempt to address well-documented biases these models have when not fine tuned.

That is what all these people are arguing, so you agree with them here. If people didn't complain then this wouldn't get fixed.

There are some people who are arguing this point, with whom I agree. There are others who are arguing that this is indicative of some objectionable ideological stance held by Google that genuinely views generating images of white people as divisive.

> objectionable ideological stance held by Google that genuinely views generating images of white people as divisive.

When I asked Gemini to "generate an image of all an black male basketball team" it gladly generated an image exactly as prompted. When I replaced "black" with "white", Gemini refused to generate the image on the grounds of being inclusive and less divisive.

> stance held by Google that genuinely views generating images of white people as divisive.

There’s no argument here, it literally says this is the reason when asked

You are equating the output of the model with the views of its creators. This incident may demonstrate some underlying dysfunction within Google but it strains credulity to believe that the creators actually think it is objectionable to generate an image depicting a white person.

These particular "guardrail responses" are there because they have been trained in from a relatively limited amount of very specific, manually curated examples telling "respond in this way" and providing this specific wording.

So I'd argue that those particular "override" responses (as opposed to majority of model answers which are emergent from large quantities of unannotated text) do represent the views of the creators, because they explicitly and intentionally chose to manufacture those particular training examples telling that this is an appropriate response to a particular type of query. This should not strain credulity - the demonstrated behavior totally doesn't look like a side-effect of some other restriction, all evidence points that Google explicitly included instructions for the model to refuse generating white-only images and the particular reasoning/justification to provide along with the refusal.

> but it strains credulity to believe that the creators actually think it is objectionable to generate an image depicting a white person.

I agree with you, but then the question is WHY do they implement a system that does exactly that? Why don't they speak up? Because they will be shut down and labeled a racist or fired, creating a chilling effect. Dissent is being squashed in the name of social justice by people who are self-righteous and arrogant and fall into the identity trap, rather than treat individiuals like the rich, wonderful, fallible creatures that we are.

> You are equating the output of the model with the views of its creators.

The existence of the guardrails and the stated reasons for their existence suggest that this is exactly what its creators expect me to do. If nobody thought that was reasonable, the guardrails wouldn't need to exist in the first place.

It was 100% trained to be that way.

> There are others who are arguing that this is indicative of some objectionable ideological stance held by Google that genuinely views generating images of white people as divisive.

I never saw such a comment. Can you link to it?

All people are saying that Google is refusing to generate images of white people due to "wokeness", which is the same explanation you gave just with different words, "wokeness" made them turn this dial until it no longer generates images of white people, they would never have shipped a model in this state otherwise.

When people talk about "wokeness" they typically mean this kind of overcorrection.

"Wokeness" is a politically charged term typically used by people of a particular political persuasion to describe people with whom they disagree.

If you asked the creators of Gemini why they altered the model from it's initial state such that it produced the observed behavior, I'm sure they would tell you that they were attempting to correct undesirable biases that existed in the training set, not "we're woke!". This is the issue I'm pointing out. Rather than viewing this incident as an honest mistake, many commenters seem to want to impute malice, or use it as evidence to support their preconceived notions about the overall ideological stance of an organization with 100,000+ employees.

The problem they're trying to address is not bias in the training set, it's bias in reality reflected in the training set.

> "Wokeness" is a politically charged term typically used by people of a particular political persuasion to describe people with whom they disagree.

Wokeness describes a very particular type of behaviour — look it up. It’s not the catch-all pejorative you think it is, unlike, say, ‘xyz-phobia’.

…and I probably don’t have the opinions you might assume I do.

Maybe my comment wasn't clear. I don't mean to say that wokeness is defined as "idea that I disagree with", but that it is a politically charged term that is not merely synonymous with "overcorrection", as the parent commenter seems to want to assert.

To be completely honest, I’m not quite sure what’s meant by ‘politically charged term’.

It doesn’t sound like a good faith argument to me; more an attempt to tar individuals with a broad brush because they happen to have used a term also used by others whose views one disapproves of. I think it’s better to try to gauge intentions rather than focusing on particular terminology and leaping to ‘you used this word which is related to this and therefore you’re really bad’ kind of conclusions.

I’m absolutely sure your view isn’t this crude, but it is how it comes across. Saying something is ‘politically charged’ isn’t an argument.

"Wokeness" refers to this kind of over correction, that is what those people means, it isn't just people they disagree with.

You not understanding the term is why you don't see why you are saying the same thing as those people. Communication gets easier when you try to listen to what people say instead of straw manning their arguments.

So when you read "woke", try substitute "over correcting" for it and it is typically still valid. Like that post above calling "woke" people racist, what he is saying is that people over corrected from being racist against blacks to being racist against whites. Just like Google here over corrected their AI to refuse to generate white people, that kind of over correction is exactly what people mean with woke.

I think that it's pretty hard to argue that refusing to draw images of white people due to racial sensitivities is an honest and unintentional mistake.

"woke mind virus" should be an automatic ban from this site, it's a thought terminating cliche so strong, any semblance of "converse curiously" is immediately thrown out the window, into a well, down into hell, bouncing around the back of the flat earth

The person above you compares the woke mind virus to a “sensible alternative explanation” so yeah they are kinda framing it as a thought terminating cliche.

An automatic ban for certain keywords (that you misunderstood) is not thought terminating and against curious conversation?

An automatic ban is probably too harsh, a warning and instruction not to use such vague and loaded terms might be helpful to lowering the heat (regardless of what political movement the terms are for, I'd discourage accusations of "fascism" just as much as "wokeness" unless accompanied by an explicit definition)

> a warning and instruction not to use such vague and loaded terms

No. We use vague and loaded terms all the time. That's OK. That's human. Paternalism yields resentment because it treats adults like babies. Some person in some corporate office trying to teach me how to think when they themselves lack critical thinking ability is unacceptable.

Whether it is "ok" in some absolute moral sense isn't relevant in this context, which is about whether it is more in keeping with the goals of hackernews to clamp down on the use of terms which result in flamewars due to confusion and misunderstanding (and no small amount of connotations and signalling).

Words like "woke" mean different things to different people and their use is very harmful to discourse between people from opposite sides on that particular culture war. Tabooing the term and replacing it with one's intended meaning can really clear things up and prevent getting people's backs up. E.g. rather than "woke" one might use "race aware" or "tribalistic" or "injustice aware" or whatever specific meaning one intends to convey. That way you can actually be understood rather than offending people because they identify as "woke" but consider it to mean "injustice aware" rather than some negative meaning.

Tl;dr: words are for communication, use words your audience has the same understanding of

> Words like "woke" mean different things to different people and their use is very harmful to discourse between people from opposite sides on that particular culture war

Here you and I are having a civil discussion and meta-conversation. We can literally talk about how the word is used, misunderstood, weaponised, etc. Thoughtful and curious debate should be encouraged. If a word triggers behavior that is unpleasant or counter productive, we should reprimand the individuals doing so not assume nobody can use the word in a civil discussion and I for one feel I learn different perspectives that I hope make me a better person.

> words are for communication, use words your audience has the same understanding o

That’s a very narrow perspective. Not only is it not achievable in principle (meanings of words shift over time and have cultural and personal context), but the point of communication is often to build shared understanding.

I do, however, it is a valid decision to want to make certain topics off limits, because they tend to devolve into chaos and a broken community, but I would argue against a blacklist of words. We should be able to discuss porn but not share porn in this site. We should be able to debate each other on wokeness (the word and our differing perspectives) without getting disrespectful or assuming bad intent or overlooking abuse.

Maybe I’m too idealistic and you have the more practical position… so I want to be open to that possibility.

I don't think I particularly disagree.

> Here you and I are having a civil discussion and meta-conversation. We can literally talk about how the word is used, misunderstood, weaponised, etc.

I want to warn you that that does not apply to all words. I was informed by moderation that the following is not acceptable: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38680523

I'm pretty curious if you agree with them there (I've actually been meaning to get around to asking someone else for their opinion but it's still emotionally a bit difficult). (I think this subthread is dead enough that no one but you will read this)

> that the following is not acceptable

I read it. What specifically did you hear was unacceptable - there’s no moderator comment attached to your writing so I cannot tell what they told you is unacceptable.

Here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38680537

(I was avoiding going to that thread again because looking at it stresses me out, I took a week long break from hackernews after that)

jumping in from the new comments page because you seem so earnest. those summations on that thread you think are unfair really don't come across as unfair summations of what you're trying to say. you call them a bald faced lie, but it's a fair reading of how what you actually wrote actually lands. what you wrote comes across as those summations. therein lies the problem. your writing doesn't land how you think it lands. there's no two ways around that. you say X, people hear Y, you say but I didn't say Y, but you really are saying Y with how you're saying X. you're trying to say Y without actually saying Y and think that if you say Y absolutely precisely enough, that Y is actually okay. so you insist you're saying X when you're saying Y, and Y simply isn't okay here. really deeply consider how you're really saying Y when you think you're saying or asking X.

take the word eugenics, for example. we've decided that's not okay. by asking modern questions around it, you think you can make it okay to support eugenics. but unfortunately words can have two meanings, and the word eugenics has picked up the meaning that non-blonde blue eyed white people are to be euthanized. thus, you can't use the word eugenics. you want it to mean one thing, but the rest of us have agreed it means this other thing, and you're left confused because you're saying X and everyone else is hearing Y because Y is what that word means to everyone else.

To add onto the prior poster (and also motivated by a reasonable likelihood that you are earnestly trying to explore precise and non-mainstream discussions online and getting frustrated that you can’t seem to without triggering <whatever negative reactions you get>).

My sad experience is that you just can’t do what you want, if what you want is most people to treat your language with the high precision you intended or to pause their emotional filters and explore some philosophical “what ifs”. You might be able to find some pure and deep thinkers in real life or private settings to explore questions highlighted in the fourth post in your link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38699727

But in public settings (including online) you mostly can’t.

You also can’t even use some words online, despite them having a very precise and innocuous meaning.

As an example:

Try to guess the reaction to something like: “when I realized Colin didn’t leave a tip, I didn’t confront him as I knew that he wasn’t going to change since that was just an inherent part of his niggardly nature.”

A human compiler, equipped with the correct dictionary definition of “niggardly” will process your sentence one way. A random person on the street, online, or in a pub is highly likely to take offense. If you insist that people are obliged to treat your sentence as if you’d said “stingy” (the definition of the race-connotation-free word “niggardly”), you’re going to be confused when many refuse.

Similarly, if you ask some of the questions from the link above among strangers in a public forum: are they asking in order to deeply explore all valid philosophies concerning them? Or are they placing poop into the pretty nice punch bowl we have here?

Many will assume and treat you as if it’s the latter, because their experience is many people do do that online, and treat you as if you’re doing that as well.

You know your intentions. Other people have to guess at them. If you communicate in a way that matches you to a pattern they have a negative reaction to, you’re going to get that reaction.

> an automatic ban from this site

That would mean you cannot talk about it. You want to constrain debate. You want issues to not be discussed. The idea that any particular word should not be rendered is absurd.

"Mind Virus" is loaded and inflammatory, but "woke" is the result of people noticing a large and highly influential social movement that refuses to name itself and chafes against any outside attempt to do so. You can't have a movement that important without a name.

https://web.archive.org/web/20211108155321/https://freddiede...

Woke is AAVE that had its meaning perverted by conservatives as one of the means to make attempts at pointing out structural inequality ridiculous, actually. So the purest definition of woke I can come up with is "person a conservative wants to silence through ridicule that their ideas are capable of merit".

So what would you call the social movement and ideology being described?

A carefully curated list of salient examples that conservatives pretend are systemic?

Forgive me if my interest in arguing with someone who quotes "CRT in schools" (with a salient example) and an intentionally (?) crude understanding of what "defund the police" means on the website that courted far right populists[1] is rather insubstantial.

I think we're just too far apart to reconcile anything. A YouTube personality called Vaush might be your kind of rhetoric if you look for left leaning people to address the claims head on, in length. I don't have the breath for it.

[1]: https://nathantankus.substack.com/p/i-am-leaving-substack

It'd be a lot less suspicious if the product lead and PR face of Gemini had not publicly written things on Twitter in the past like "this is America, where racism is the #1 value our populace seeks to uphold above all." This suggests something top-down being imposed on unwilling employees, not a "virus."

Like, if I were on that team, it'd be pretty risky to question this, and it'd probably not lead to change. So they let the public do it instead.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39465515.

Bing also generates political propaganda (guess of what side) if you ask it to generate images with the prompt "person holding a sign that says" without any further content.

https://twitter.com/knn20000/status/1712562424845599045

https://twitter.com/ramonenomar/status/1722736169463750685

https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/1ao1avd/why_did_thi...

https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/1ao1avd/why_did_thi...

If I clutched my pearls any harder they'd turn to dust.

I mean, that's just reflecting the biases of people typically holding signs in the real world...

Hilarious that these outputs, depicting black founding fathers, popes, warriors, etc., overturn the narrative that history was full of white oppression.

I believe this to be a symptom of a much, much deeper problem than "DEI gone too far". I'm sure that without whatever systems is preventing Gemini from producing pictures of white people, it would be extremely biased towards generating pictures of white people, presumably due to an incredibly biased training data set.

I don't remember which one, but there was some image generation AI which was caught pretty much just appending the names of random races to the prompt, to the point that prompts like "picture of a person holding up a sign which says" would show pictures of people holding signs with the words "black" or "white" or "asian" on them. This was also a hacky workaround for the fact that the data set was biased.

> I believe this to be a symptom of a much, much deeper problem than "DEI gone too far".

James Lindsey's excellent analysis has it as Marxism. He makes great points.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9K5PLkj0N_b9JTPdSRwPkg

"Marxism" isn't responsible for bias in training sets, no.

There are 3 parts to the LLM, not 2: the training set, the RLHF biasing process, and the prompt (incl. injections or edits).

The first two steps happen ahead of time and are frequently misunderstood as being the same thing or essentially having the same nature. The last happens at runtime.

The training set is a data collection challenge. Biasing through training data is hard because you need so much of it for a good result.

Reinforcement learning with human feedback is simply clown alchemy. It is not a science like chemistry. There are no fundamental principles guiding the feedback of the humans — if they even use humans anymore (this feedback can itself be generated). The feedback cannot be measured and added in fractions. It is not reproducible and is ungovernable. It is the perfect place to inject the deep biasing.

Prompt manipulation, in contrast, is a brute force tool lacking all subtlety — that doesn’t make it ineffective! It’s a solution used to communicate that a mandate has definitely been implemented and can be “verified” by toggling whether it’s applied or not.

It’s not possible to definitively say whether Marxism has had an effect in the RLHF step.

> Biasing through training data is hard because you need so much of it for a good result.

That's the opposite of the case? Avoiding bias through training data is hard, specifically because you need so much of it. You end up scraping all sources of data you can get your hands on. Society has certain biases, those biases are reflected in our media, that media is scraped to train a model, those biases are reflected in the model. That means models end up biased by default.

> It’s not possible to definitively say whether Marxism has had an effect in the RLHF step.

Sure it is. Every thought and opinion and ideology of every human involved in the RLHF step "has had an effect" in the RHLF step, because they have influenced the humans which select which output is good and bad (or influenced the humans which trained the model which selects which output is good and bad). I would be surprised if no human involved in RLHF has some ideas inspired by Marxist thought, even if the influence there is going to be much smaller than e.g capitalist thought.

The problem is that you don't want to suggest "Marxism, among with most other ideologies, has had an effect", you want (or at least verisimi wants) to paint this as a Marxist conspiracy in a "cultural bolshevism"[1] sense.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Bolshevism

The ambient bias in the training data is not a concern. The directional bias that can be inflicted during the RLHF step consumes most of my concern.

How? Simply by putting the right types of people onto the task! Don’t you know that the human participants in RLHF processes are screened? Will the feedback provided by homogeneous collections of Ultra MAGA Trumpers, Woke Zealots, or WEF Sycophants result in an unbiased model? The same model?

Do we know who provided feedback to Gemini? Do we know what they were told, promised, or paid?

Only Google HR knows.

> I'm sure that without whatever systems is preventing Gemini from producing pictures of white people, it would be extremely biased towards generating pictures of white people, presumably due to an incredibly biased training data set.

I think the fundamental problem, though, is saying a training set is "incredibly biased" has come to mean two different things, and the way Google is trying to "fix" things shows essentially some social engineering goals that I think people can fairly disagree with and be upset about. For example, consider a prompt "Create a picture for me of a stereotypical CEO of a Fortune 500 company." When people talk about bias, they can mean:

1. The training data shows many more white men by proportion than actually are Fortune 500 CEOs. I think nearly all people would agree this is a fair definition of bias, where the training data doesn't match reality.

2. Alternatively, there are fundamentally many more white men who are Fortune 500 CEOs by proportion than the general population. But suppose the training data actually reflects that reality. Is that "bias"? To say it is means you are making a judgment call as to what is the root cause behind the high numbers of white male CEOs. And I think that judgment call may be fine by itself, but I at least start to feel very uncomfortable when an AI decides to make the call that its Fortune 500 CEOs have to all look like the world population at large, even when Fortune 500 CEOs don't, and likely never will, look like the world population at large.

Google is clearly taking on that second definition of bias as well. I gave it 2 prompts in the same conversation. First, "Who are some famous black women?" I think it gave a good sampling of historical and contemporary figures, and it ended with "This is just a small sampling of the many incredible black women who have made their mark on the world. There are countless others who deserve recognition for their achievements in various fields, from science and technology to politics and the arts."

I then asked it "Who are some famous white women?" It also gave a good sampling of historical and contemporary figures, but also inexplicably added Rosa Parks with the text "and although not white herself, deserves mention for her immense contributions", had Malala Yousafzai as the first famous contemporary white woman, Serena Williams with the text "although not white herself, is another noteworthy individual.", and Oprah Winfrey, with no disclaimer. Also, it ended with a cautionary snippet that couldn't differ more from the ending of the previous prompt, "Additionally, it's important to remember that fame and achievement are not limited to any one racial group. There are countless other incredible women of all backgrounds who have made significant contributions to the world, and it's important to celebrate their diverse experiences and accomplishments."

Look, I get frustrated when people on the right complain on-and-on about "wokeism", but I'm starting to get more frustrated when other people can't admit they have some pretty valid points. Google might have good intentions but they have simply gone off the rails when they've baked so much "white = bad, BIPOC = good" into Gemini.

EDIT: OK, this one is just so transparently egregiously bad. I asked Gemini "Who are some famous software engineers?" The first result was Alan Turing (calling him a "software engineer" may be debatable, but fair enough and the text blurb about him was accurate), but the picture of him, which it captioned "Alan Turing, software engineer" is actually this person, https://mixedracefaces.com/home/british-indian-senior-resear.... Google is trying so hard to find non-white people it uses a pic of a completely different person from mixedracefaces.com when there must be tons of accurate pictures available of Alan Turing online? It's like Google is trying to be the worst caricature of DEI-run-amok that its critics accuse it of.

>Google might have good intentions

Don't be evil

Image generators probably should follow your prompt closely and use probable genders and skin tones when unspecified, but I'm fully in support of having a gender and skin tone randomizer checkbox. The ahistorical results are just too interesting.

these are pretty badass as images i think; it's only the context that makes them bad

the viking ones might even be historically accurate (if biased); not only did vikings recruit new warriors from abroad, they also enslaved concubines from abroad, and their raiding reached not only greenland (inhabited by inuit peoples) and north america (rarely!) but also the mediterranean. so it wouldn't be terribly surprising for a viking warrior a thousand years ago to have a great-grandmother who was kidnapped or bought from morocco, greenland, al-andalus, or baghdad. and of course many sami are olive-skinned, and viking contact with sami was continuous

the vitamin-d-deprived winters of scandinavia are not kind to dark-skinned people (how do the inuit do it? perhaps their diet has enough vitamin d even without sun?), but those genes won't die out in a generation or two, even if 50 generations later there isn't much melanin left

a recent paper on this topic with disappointingly sketchy results is https://www.duo.uio.no/handle/10852/83989

> (how do the inuit do it? perhaps their diet has enough vitamin d even without sun?)

Two parts:

First, they're not exposing their skin to the sun. There's no reason to have paler skin to get more UV if it's covered up most of the year.

Secondly, for the Inuit diet there are parts that are very Vitamin D rich... and there are still problems.

Vitamin D-rich marine Inuit diet and markers of inflammation – a population-based survey in Greenland https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4709837/

> The traditional Inuit diet in Greenland consists mainly of fish and marine mammals, rich in vitamin D. Vitamin D has anti-inflammatory capacity but markers of inflammation have been found to be high in Inuit living on a marine diet

Vitamin D deficiency among northern Native Peoples: a real or apparent problem? - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3417586/

> Vitamin D deficiency seems to be common among northern Native peoples, notably Inuit and Amerindians. It has usually been attributed to: (1) higher latitudes that prevent vitamin D synthesis most of the year; (2) darker skin that blocks solar UVB; and (3) fewer dietary sources of vitamin D. Although vitamin D levels are clearly lower among northern Natives, it is less clear that these lower levels indicate a deficiency. The above factors predate European contact, yet pre-Columbian skeletons show few signs of rickets—the most visible sign of vitamin D deficiency. Furthermore, because northern Natives have long inhabited high latitudes, natural selection should have progressively reduced their vitamin D requirements. There is in fact evidence that the Inuit have compensated for decreased production of vitamin D through increased conversion to its most active form and through receptors that bind more effectively. Thus, when diagnosing vitamin D deficiency in these populations, we should not use norms that were originally developed for European-descended populations who produce this vitamin more easily and have adapted accordingly.

Vitamin D intake by Indigenous Peoples in the Canadian Arctic - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10260879/

> Vitamin D is an especially fascinating nutrient to study in people living in northern latitudes, where sun exposure is limited from nearly all day in summer to virtually no direct sun exposure in winter. This essential nutrient is naturally available from synthesis in the skin through the action of UVB solar rays or from a few natural sources such as fish fats. Vitamin D is responsible for enhancing many physiological processes related to maintaining Ca and P homeostasis, as well as for diverse hormone functions that are not completely understood.

wow, thank you, this is great information!

do you suppose the traditional scandinavian diet is also lower in vitamin d? or is their apparent selection for blondness just a result of genetically higher vitamin d needs?

Note that I'm not medically trained nor a dietician... so this is pure layman poorly founded speculation...

I am inclined to believe that genetic changes within the Inuit reduce vitamin D needs, the modern Scandinavian diet differs from a historical one, the oceanic climate of Scandinavia is warmer than the inland climate of North America (compare Yellowknife 62° N with Rana at 66° N and Tromsø at 69° N https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subarctic_climate ) so that more skin can be non-fatally exposed...

And the combination of this had more skin exposed for better vitamin D production in Scandinavia and so the pressure was for lighter skin while the diet of the Inuit meant that that pressure for skin tone wasn't selected for.

... And I'll 100% defer to someone else with a better understanding of the genetics and dietitian aspects.

huh, that's a really interesting idea! the theory is that exposing skin to the sun is a cheaper way to get vitamin d than the inuit genetic adaptations, and so given the possibility of doing so, the scandinavians (and sami) experienced a strong genetic selective pressure for light skin which the inuit didn't?

okay, now i'm just waiting for the study that shows that scandinavians are on average actually genetically 20% arabic and 20% west african, it's just that for centuries nobody suspected because they were so pointlessly obsessed with skin color ;)

The Scandinavian and Sami were coming from the lighter skinned European populations and so didn't need as much change to become even lighter skinned.

The populations for North America were from an asian branch of the human migrations and so started with darker skins. The larger change to skin tone combined with less pressure (from diet) and the "it isn't that viable to shift to a less melanistic skin tone".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleo-Indians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopling_of_the_Americas and https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Early_migrations_mer...

This compares to a relatively more recent (12000 years - twice the age of the pyramids rather than four times the age of the pyramids for 25000 years ago) migration from Europe into Scandinavia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_Stone_Age ).

> The Nordic Stone Age refers to the Stone Age of Scandinavia. During the Weichselian glaciation (115,000 – 11,700 years ago), almost all of Scandinavia was buried beneath a thick permanent ice cover, thus, the Stone Age came rather late to this region. As the climate slowly warmed up by the end of the ice age, nomadic hunters from central Europe sporadically visited the region. However, it was not until around 12,000 BCE that permanent, but nomadic, habitation in the region took root.

> Around 11,400 BCE, the Bromme culture emerged in Southern Scandinavia. This was a more rapidly warming era providing opportunity for other substantial hunting game animals than the ubiquitous reindeer. As former hunter-gather cultures, the Bromme culture was still largely dependent on reindeer and lived a nomadic life, but their camps diversified significantly and they were the first people to settle Southern Scandinavia (and the Southern Baltic area) on a permanent, yet still nomadic, basis.

---

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_history_of_the_Indigen...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_Q-M242

The population that migrated to North America 25000 years ago may have been darker skinned than the European branch of human migration where a lighter skin tone developed. This, combined with later genetic isolation (note we're talking about two continents - but this is isolated compared to the possible movement of genes within Europe and Scandinavia 12000 years ago and more recently) fixed the darker skin, and the adaptation for vitamin D in the Inuit population because of the lighter skin wasn't genetically advantageous and was a greater genetic distance from the population compared to the Scandinavian migrations which was followed by the Holocene climatic optimum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_climatic_optimum with even more warming of Northern Europe resulting in a lighter skin tone being an easier genetic path for greater vitamin D during the summer months.

... And all of that is a just so story that I'd love to go and be a grad student working on the genetic diversity of early human migrations now to find out if it actually worked that way or if I'm just making things up.

maybe! but there does seem to be a strong selective pressure for skin melanin from sunniness that operates over only a few millennia in at least some cases; consider indigenous australians and southern indians in addition to the neotenically blond scandinavians

I am inclined to believe that the pressure for more melanin (cancer, sunburns) is a more rapid adaptation than decreasing it.

Human skin pigmentation, migration and disease susceptibility - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3267121/

> Human skin pigmentation evolved as a compromise between the conflicting physiological demands of protection against the deleterious effects of ultraviolet radiation (UVR) and photosynthesis of UVB-dependent vitamin D3. Living under high UVR near the equator, ancestral Homo sapiens had skin rich in protective eumelanin. Dispersals outside of the tropics were associated with positive selection for depigmentation to maximize cutaneous biosynthesis of pre-vitamin D3 under low and highly seasonal UVB conditions. In recent centuries, migrations and high-speed transportation have brought many people into UVR regimes different from those experienced by their ancestors and, accordingly, exposed them to new disease risks. These have been increased by urbanization and changes in diet and lifestyle. Three examples—nutritional rickets, multiple sclerosis (MS) and cutaneous malignant melanoma (CMM)—are chosen to illustrate the serious health effects of mismatches between skin pigmentation and UVR.

Also of interest - The colours of humanity: the evolution of pigmentation in the human lineage https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2016.034...

The different pathways for depigmentation are different.

> The fact that depigmented skin evolved independently in the ancestors of modern Europeans and East Asians suggests that at least two (and probably more) distinct genetic mutation events occurred and that multiple loci underwent positive selection in these two regions receiving relatively low levels of UVB. The most likely reason for this was that it was associated with a loss of skin pigment that favoured vitamin D production under conditions of low UVB.

yeah, that makes a lot of sense

however, the downvotes on my comment upthread are making it clear that this is not the kind of place where it's safe to discuss questions like whether the selective pressure for more melanin from sunburns is stronger or weaker than the selective pressure for less melanin from rickets

I feel like maybe only one or two of these are actually "wrong" but can be easily fixed with prompts. The outrage seems excessive

> but can be easily fixed with prompts.

That's just it, though.

They can't be. If you specifically ask for a "white pope", Gemini refuses and essentially tells you that asking for a white person is offensive and racist.

Ask for a black/Native American/Asian/Indian/etc Pope, and it will make one. Ask for just a "Pope" with no race specified, and you'll get a random race and never a white one. Ask for a white Pope, it tells you it can't do that.